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Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-was
by Herring 8mo ago
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/ZXZLAMEEVJHZRDDY5LGDFZ3OEQ.png https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
- crims0n 8mo agoSurely some of that is lag time in economic policy.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
- lostlogin 8mo agoWW2 really got the US economy going, so maybe the issue it a lack of scale in the warring?
- crims0n 8mo agoWasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
- lazide 8mo agoI suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause. Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.
- frogperson 8mo agoThreatening all of our allies with war and tarrifs is a great way to tank confidence in the US and its businesses. Ask me how I know.
- DaSHacka 8mo agoOh, so every Republican administration dating back to FDR did the same?
- bryanrasmussen 8mo agoDid you look at the graph? Eisenhower had two terms = 8 years - did poorly. Kennedy + Johnson two Democratic terms in a row = 8 years, did well. Nixon + Ford, two Republican in row = 8 years, did poorly. Carter 1 term, did well. Reagan Bush - 3 terms Republicans 12 years, did poorly. Clinton 2 terms 8 years did well. Bush the second, 2 terms 8 years did poorly. Obama 2 terms 8 years did well. Trump, 1 term did extremely poorly Biden 1 term did well. So this 4 years thing you're talking about you mean that we can't be sure about Biden, Trump, or Carter. Fair enough, is the 8 years good enough or is that also too short to draw a conclusion?
- kingkawn 8mo agoYet it tracks for decades with successive D/R presidents, suggesting that this 4 year excuse is not enough to dismiss the correlation
- Braxton1980 8mo agoWhy aren't you trying to be political? What exactly do you think "political" is?
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration Correct. But across repeated administrations, some of which held power for two terms, one can identify patterns. Post-Reagan Republicans have been a consistent trash fire for the American worker.
- sigmoid10 8mo agoThe fact that consecutive Republican administrations in this graph fared even worse suggests that is not the case.
- lostlogin 8mo agoI’d have called Reagan very conservative, am I missing something?
- bobthepanda 8mo agoAre you misreading the word consecutive as conservative?
- lostlogin 8mo agoYes.
- nxm 8mo agoLet's not omit the fact that Covid hit in Trump's last year in 2020, where he had a booming economy and lowest unemployment late historically amongst minorities.
- nullocator 8mo agoLet's not omit the fact that Trump's handling of Covid was selfish (deny it exists), reckless (deny it exists even harder), foolish (inject bleach), and destabilizing (constantly spewing conflicting information and undermining scientists and experts, you'll to this day still find a steady stream of HN commenters that hold an eternal vendetta against Anthony Fauci for some perceived unforgivable inarticulable wrong he's done.)
- Hikikomori 8mo agoWas handed a booming economy from Obama and largely didn't do anything except cut taxes for the rich a bit. Mostly grownups in his cabinet stopping him from doing stupid shit. The Greenland thing started back then and they thought it was a joke.
- sigmoid10 8mo agoIt's even crazier when you look at the data since the end of the cold war in 1989. Then the ratio of jobs created is 50:1 for democrats.
- dataviz1000 8mo agoHow am I supposed to consolidate my power if the market doesn't crash so I can purchase residential and commercial real estate at bargain prices? Every third restaurant and business on Las Olas was shuttered in 2009, the buildings sold for next to nothing. Today there's one after another—Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Maserati—parked on the street in front of those same buildings, all the while, Steve B. and I enjoy that Luigi's coal fired pizza! /s
- shimman 8mo agoYeah, they call this "accumulation by dispossession" and it's been a mainstay of neoliberal economics since it's inception roughly ~50 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulation_by_dispossession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulation_by_dispossession Don't know why you're downvoted, that such possibilities are allowed in a completely made up system that can be changed at any time to better society, and not just ~10,000 people across the world, is a gross indictment of the current system. All neoliberalism has done is made us more alienated, privatized the public commons, destroyed the environment, and hasten income inequality to levels that were worse than the gilded age. If something doesn't change soon... we'll you can use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
- Herring 8mo agoThat Thatcher example was brutal. I have an interest in social housing (Vienna, Singapore). The idea of selling it like that is insane to me, like if Taiwan sold TSMC for pennies on the dollar. And made it illegal to start another chipmaking company.
- dataviz1000 8mo ago
- 0xy 8mo agoNothing happened in 2020 to affect this chart I'm sure. I would expect nothing less from the publication that falsely claimed Russians hacked into the US energy grid before an election.
- lostlogin 8mo agoMany publications have made that claim about a Russian hack. Is it inaccurate?
- gertlex 8mo agoOk, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...
- 0xy 8mo agoCorrect. The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 and was 3.6% in January 2020. Or if we look at total private sector employment that went from 123,300,000 to 129,300,000 (its highest ever, at the time). That's an average of 125,000 jobs per month, or equivalent to Obama (although Obama's unemployment was significantly higher for both terms).
- mlcrypto 8mo ago9/11, 2008, and now AI job displacement is also bad luck
- catlover76 8mo ago[dead]
- gsibble 8mo ago[flagged]
- dima55 8mo agoMacro-economic policy is political. I'm sorry.
- mindslight 8mo agoIt apparently does when one major party is full of destructionists who have had much success in politicizing everything, including a lot of what used to just be basic core American values.
- DaSHacka 8mo ago[flagged]
- mindslight 8mo agoSorry, you can't both sides this. Controlled opposition and failing to push substantive reforms due to a few "centrists" is not the same as policies that openly seek to destroy our cherished idea of Constitutionally-limited government and economic position of world leadership.
- DaSHacka 8mo agoI'll believe it when I see that actually happening.
- mindslight 8mo agoThis sounds like outright denial to me. There are already many red lines that have been crossed, and plainly stated intentions to go much further. I know it's comforting to write off the red lines as isolated incidents, and the statements as harmless political trolling. But at this point its utter foolishness - there are hard-earned reasons why we reaffirm societal values rather than trashing them.
- Vicinity9635 8mo ago[flagged]
- delecti 8mo agoWhich is really neither here nor there. Anyone implicated by the Epstein files should go to jail. That can remain true while also not being relevant to a discussion of which party's economic policy has historically performed better.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Vicinity9635 8mo ago[dead]
- gok 8mo agoThere are many marginally employable swing voters who vote Republican when they have jobs and the Democrats in charge ask for taxes, then vote Democratic when they get put out of work and need a social safety net.
- steveBK123 8mo agoThis is largely the crux of it. GOP is the fun dad party and Dems are the mommy party. Republicans run economy hot until it blows, then Dems get voted in to clean up. People get annoyed about taxes and regulation when economy is ok again, fun dad promises ice cream and pizza for dinner forever.. rinse & repeat.
- jaybrendansmith 8mo agoWrong. What's also in the data is that Ds also create the most economic growth. Sorry. Rs just believe in things that are not true, as evidenced by the current admins wacky tariff theories that are disproved in Econ 101.
- orangecat 8mo agoRs just believe in things that are not true, as evidenced by the current admins wacky tariff theories that are disproved in Econ 101. I'm happy to see many Democrats now supporting free trade, but that's traditionally been a conservative position.
- steveBK123 8mo agoDems been largely on board since the 90s. Recall NAFTA was under Clinton admin.
- Hikikomori 8mo agoWhy are you pretending like no tariffs is the democratic plan.
- jandrewrogers 8mo agoCongress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoThat’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does
- zeroonetwothree 8mo agoIf you are referring to the current administration, SCOTUS has barely "rubber stamped" any of his actions, and has rejected several already (though we will see with tariffs... but Polymarket has it only 31% in favor of the president so at least the odds are in our favor).
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoYou mean like he is now able to fire government workers, impound funds, fire people who were supposed to be independent of the executive branch, and basically saying he could commit crimes and send the national guard to states?
- steveBK123 8mo agoExcept they have abdicated most responsibility, especially when the president is of the same party, for decades. Many now talk like they work for the president.
- cloverich 8mo agoAnd the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto). Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.
- treis 8mo agoI'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days. The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoI'll see if I can dig it up, but I remember reading that on average, under democratic presidencies going back to FDR, the economy in general performs better than it does under a republican presidency. If I'm remembering right, it's not as simple as mere ideological differences because there has been changes within the parties in those intervening ~75 years but the trend still holds.
- xethos 8mo agoFound your article for you, as I was looking it up the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agothanks!
- esbranson 8mo agoCES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol. JOLTS is where stress shows first. Openings fall,[1] hiring slows,[2] quits drop,[3] and layoffs rise later.[4] Biden in particular shows the weakness of your provided stats. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIL [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUL [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL
- gpt5 8mo agoThanks for providing actual data and contributing to the discussion instead of the knee-jerk responses in the rest of the replies here. The charts paint a much more precise picture on what is happening, and I actually don't see anything that strongly support it being a partisan effect.
- gruez 8mo ago>CES establishment payroll survey monthly change averages is quite the choice of stats lol. Can you explain why? Given that it's presumably averaged over the president's entire term, doesn't that provide a good measure of how much jobs were added under a given administration?
- 8mo ago
- WillPostForFood 8mo agoCarter has good employment, but terrible inflation making everyone poor in miserable. His Fed appointee, Paul Volcker raises interest rates, kills inflation, puts the country in recession, and drives unemployment up during Reagan's first years in office. Carter's job numbers look better than they should, and Reagan's worse, unless you look at the bigger picture.
- reactordev 8mo agoThe bigger picture being that this is political nonsense. We all know Reganomics.
- stopbulying 8mo agoThey did not pay their bill for their own agenda then, and they have still not paid their bill for trillions in follow-on expenses. They cut taxes and debt-financed war, which forced the US further into debt.
- Hikikomori 8mo agoIn modern times republicans got US into most wars. Nixon also got Vietnam extended.
- stopbulying 8mo agoNixon and a cabinet full of German last names changed the US from a fractional reserve banking system to a floating petrodollar. The USD was then overly sensitive to oil shortages and oil price speculation. Generalized inflation (due to oil supply shocks and speculation) lost Carter the election in 1980. (Carter wins among US Presidents for least deaths on his watch.) Most US invasions since 1980 have been the result of Reagan/Bush international oil meddling. They were only able to take power because of unpopular inflation. And susceptibility to "revival superstar" oil saviors with Trilateral/CIA oil plans. But they don't pay their bills for debt-financing illegal foreign wars. Anyways, Nixon also disregarded the La Guardia commission and the interim findings of the Shaeffer report. So, after the supreme court back then in Leary vs in 1969 overturned the Tax Stamp Act of 1937 after 32 years on the grounds that the law required self-incriminatiom for compliance, Nixon re-criminalized medical Kaneh Bosm.
- arnonejoe 8mo agoI looked this up. "10 of the 11 recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican administrations”. It seems Republican = Recession.
- IncreasePosts 8mo agoOk, but is it cause or effect? Maybe Republicans do well when there is fear about the economy and a recession is coming.
- slater 8mo agoDepends. If it's a Republican president in office, we must look at many factors, it's a difficult thing, y'see, many variables and such, market fluctuations, etc. etc. etc. If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.
- BonitaPersona 8mo agoIsn't literally this, but unironically, what dem supporters are doing in the least voted comments here? Why try to make it as if it was the "opposite side" doing it while I'm reading it?
- Braxton1980 8mo agoBecause Trump is an exception due to his abuse of executive power.
- Vicinity9635 8mo ago[flagged]
- krapp 8mo agoAre we seriously still doing the TDS meme in this, the Year of Our Lord 2026? At this point even his own people know he's a psychopath. "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is just another term for "being right all along."
- theropost 8mo agoI mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues. Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on. So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.
- Hikikomori 8mo agoIf you think republicans lowered spending I have a bridge to sell. See two Santas strategy.
- davefol 8mo agoI’m not sure how true this is given that both Clinton and Obama cut the deficits and in Obama’s case he did it despite complaints from the left.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- victor106 8mo ago> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth. https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/ https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-und... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presi...
- kryogen1c 8mo agoI've always heard market forces and policies dont take effect until the following presidency.
- lostlogin 8mo agoThe top comment has a graph. If you ignore single term presidents, the pattern remains the same.
- isthatafact 8mo agoThat seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents. I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.
- stopbulying 8mo agoIs there a line chart or a stacked area chart of this over time? This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.
- jeffbee 8mo agoJoe Biden also presided over the largest America that ever existed, and took power at a moment when a huge rebound in jobs was inevitable.
- stopbulying 8mo agoSo you haven't disagreed that Joe Biden is the greatest job creating president ever? You've just helped explain that job creation was necessary due to the disaster performance of his predecessors.
- jeffbee 8mo agoYes, but as a person with good number sense I am pretty good at discounting absolute levels for population change, and I feel like most people aren't any good at that, so I like to mention it. The majority of press articles that are about "[[Thing]] hits record high" turn out to lose their novelty when recast per capita.
- stopbulying 8mo ago> population change How does that affect the job growth statistic?
- therealdrag0 8mo agoWhy are you ignoring Covid? Any president woulda ended 2020 with jobs losses.
- stopbulying 8mo agoBecause they forced the bond yield curve inversion in August 2019, forcing the NY Fed to do repos. Bond yield curve inversion prior to COVID and probably due to what they had done economically by then
- zeroonetwothree 8mo agoI don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.
- kingkawn 8mo agoIf that were true then why would there be such a glaringly clear example that presidential party influences economic performance?
- jfengel 8mo agoMostly coincidence. There aren't that many data points. There are under a dozen Presidents in the last half century. Too small to attribute significance. I do believe that there could be a small causative effect, but there is usually a very long delay between cause and effect.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 8mo agoWonder if it's more of the activist having an affect? During democrat administrations, groups like NRA scream "they're coming for your guns" causing gun sales to go up during democrat admins and then drop off during GOP admins as the rhetoric drops off.
- kingkawn 8mo agoSo the actual data is irrelevant because you can dream up of minor hypothesis?
- _DeadFred_ 8mo agoMan all kind of inferences get made on HN that new jobs will just appear after AI takes existing jobs because... jobs appeared in the past. This party/president assumption seems much more likely that that one which is based on zero actual data points but seems to be gospel to half of HN.
- hcurtiss 8mo agoIs it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?
- duxup 8mo agoThe consecutive GOP events don't seem to point to that.
- Atlas667 8mo agoIt's the ratcheting mechanism of bipartisanship. One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class. Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.
- tlogan 8mo agoThere has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress. For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act. And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle? More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
- nxm 8mo agoOr Covid when roughly 22 million jobs were lost in March and April 2020 alone
- sehansen 8mo agoThe 2008 housing crisis would have played out exactly the same if Glass-Steagall had still been in effect. The big banks that failed--Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch--were all pure investment banks. The same applied to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, back then. And most of the small banks that failed were pure commercial banks. The whole mortgage-backed security and collateralized debt obligation show would also have been legal under Glass-Steagall and had been common practice for years by the time of the repeal. The same with NINJA and 0% down-payment loans.
- themafia 8mo agoYea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise. The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?
- Dig1t 8mo ago>S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color. Democratic administrations also engage in and promote discriminatory hiring policies which flagrantly violate the civil rights act (Title VII specifically). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
- lostlogin 8mo agoBased on that link, I don’t think I want the jobs that were created. It would also pay to keep in mind that the link claims that the preceding layoffs hit the same group. Ie, they were the ones there to be hired after losing their jobs. It also says that people of colour are underrepresented in the job market (in the companies measured in your link) when compared to their overall makeup of the population. Correcting that would take some years of imbalance in hiring.
- stogot 8mo agoIt often takes years to show the effect of one administration’s policies? How do we know that Eisenhower’s policies didn’t “help” Kennedy job market ? Or that Obama’s policies didn’t “hurt” Trump job market? Picking two examples This graph is too simple as there were also other macroeconomic situations at the time but this is interesting enough that I’d like to see a long article that expands on this one graph with other data